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Healthier Together

Healthier Together is a review of health and social care in Greater Manchester. It covers primary, community and hospital services and the impact on social care. The review is led by a Service Transformation Team and is accountable to Greater Manchester's twelve Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs).

This review will consider how best to provide the right service, at the right time, in the right place to achieve the best health outcomes with the resources available.

What is being reviewed?

The Healthier Together programme is reviewing health and social care services throughout Greater Manchester. One of the aims behind the service is to provide more services in primary care within the community and at home rather than in hospital and ensure that these services are fit for purpose.

The review taking place will determine how services are currently provided and will look at how these services can be best delivered in the future. The main clinical workstreams are:

Urgent and emergency care (including acute medicine)

Emergency general surgery

Primary care (including long term conditions)

Children's services

Cardiac and vascular

Cancer

Medicine and frail elderly (including rehabilitation)

Neurosciences

Mental health

Why change is needed

The vision behind the programme is to:

Improve the health and wellbeing of people in Greater Manchester

Improve equality of access to high quality care

Improve people's experience of health care services

Make better use of healthcare resources.

There are a number of reasons why change is needed including increased demands on the NHS and social care system. People are living longer with multiple conditions and this places greater demands on the healthcare system. These demands come at a time when resources for the public sector are being reduced.

The system needs to change to ensure that more people can be cared for in the most appropriate setting, whilst receiving the specialist care they need in hospital when required. It has been recognised that the local system may need to work together with a wider range of partners to help meet these local pressures and demands placed on the system.

Healthier Together will aim to encourage people to take greater responsibility for their own health and will shift the balance between services provided from hospitals to care in the community and in people's own homes. This will mean improving access to GPs and other primary care staff and by providing better access to very specialist care in our hospitals. Resources are currently spread too thinly across Greater Manchester, which leads to differences in the services available out of hours and at weekends, often leading to poorer outcomes for patients. This review will aim to make services more accessible and affordable for the future, to make the best possible use of the resources available.